Copyright: Copyright ® ...


quickSkin
Welcome to quickSkin

quickSkin aims to be the quickest and easiest Winamp skin maker ever.

You can select pictures (bitmaps) of anything you choose and make them into a winamp skin in seconds. Optionally you can customise your skin by changing the color of the windows, text, equalizer etc.

quickSkin is funware - give it a try and see if you like it, and feel free to give it away or distribute it as you please.

What does this program do?

Three Steps to making a Winamp skin

The Playlist window. Why is it different?

Feedback


Topic1
What does quickSkin do?

quickSkin creates the main files which make a Winamp Skin. Specifically quickSkin creates:-

main.bmp
titlebar.bmp
volume.bmp
balance.bmp
posBar.bmp
monoSter.bmp
shufRep.bmp
cButtons.bmp
eqMain.bmp
plEdit.bmp
eq_ex.bmp
playPaus.bmp
text.bmp
nums_ex.bmp
viscolor.txt
plEdit.txt

quickSkin can either be used to extract transparently the areas of a picture that make up Winamp's buttons and controls, or it can give the windows and buttons a 3D effect.

quickSkin can also be used to color in other areas of a skin: the text windows and sliding controls.

Back


Three steps to a Winamp skin
1. Load in one or more pictures

You can arrange your skin as:

one bitmap in each of the three Winamp windows

one bitmap stretched across main and equalizer windows
  + one in play list window

one bitmap covering all three windows

Any bitmap loaded will be stretched/shrunk to fit. If you don't want your pictures to stretch or shrink, then use a paint tool like Paint Shop Pro to edit your bitmaps before making them into skins. The actual size of each Winamp window is 275 pixels by 116.

2. Make the Skin

Select 'MakeSkin'.

Bingo! You can make the skin as 'buttons only' which really means all the relevant files will be saved without symbols on them, or you can select from two slightly different 3D styles.

OPTIONAL - change background colors: select 'ColorTools'

Most of your bitmaps will be converted to the skin windows and buttons, but there's still a lot of bits that remain:- sliding buttons like the volume control, text windows, the equalizer controls etc.

You can change the colors of any of these things: select 'Color Tools' and have a play.

3. Save the Skin

Select 'SaveSkin'. Winamp skins must be saved in a sub-folder of your default Winamp skins directory (usually this is c:\Program Files\winamp\skins). quickSkin makes this easy, just select a name for your skin and quickSkin will create the directory for you.

Back


PlayList Window
Winamp treats the third window differently to the other two, this is because Winamp allows the window to be pulled out to any size.

There is no direct mapping from a single bit-map to the window, instead Winamp builds the playlist frame up out of little blocks of pictures which are repeated, like a row of bricks.

This is particularly noticeable along the top bar. quickSkin tries to make the best of any picture you give it: all the corners map directly, and the middle of the top bar does too, but the rest of the frame is built from small repeated sections which quickSkin gets by sampling the picture you give it.

So, some pictures work well and some don't. Pictures that work well are:

1.If you can give it a picture that only has detail in the middle of the top bar (where the title is) and at the bottom (which maps more completely) you'll get a good effect.

2. Pictures that are fairly plain/all one color.

3. Pictures that have a pattern, such as marble or a weave.

Back


Feedback

Comments on this program are welcomed to:

john@greenbaize.demon.co.uk

Back